The claim isn't "we don't like it", the claim is "this is damaging to society".
I don't agree with such things in many cases (and many people disagree with me when I'm the one saying something is damaging to society), but it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
> No one, including governments or payment processors, should be in the position to decide whether a platform can sell something or not.
It's kinda the job of the government to decide such things; but an automatic extension of that is, it's not the job of the payment processors… and I think they should be banned from doing so because it's damaging to society to let them take on this role.
That's their framing, it's not what they actually do.
If Collective Shout was a group that studied which things caused harm, and then campaigned against those things, then the point you're trying to make could stand.
They're not. They've campaigned to ban rap artists, GTA 5, "50 Shades", lingerie ads, whatever random thing is around at the time - always under the pretext that it harms someone, but never with any evidence or substantial arguments that it does.
In practice groups like this campaign against whatever they don't like, so it's correct to refute them on those grounds.
And idiots eat that shit up thinking fighting the woke mind virus is the real censorship, jumping straight into the arms of moralistic fascists like this.
I wish I knew how we failed. (I am "woke" but I disagree with mob tactics, and think it's done more harm than good, and there are a lot of disingenuous abusers of said ideology to boost their personal cred, chasing online clout over any substance. And plenty of the right-wingers will notice this, and "fight it" but fail to notice the same thing in their own side; because to them it's not about a principle it's about "punishing the bad guys" who don't like what I like).
"Cancel culture is bad akshully unless I'm the one cancelling you (c.f. bud light, etc...)"
In some countries, maybe. In the US, there were concerted attempts (like the First Amendment to the Constitution) to prevent that from being the government's job, because of the fear that government would use that job to suppress dissent and coerce opinions.
If payment processors are picking up that job, and doing so in a coordinated manner that doesn't allow porn companies to simply say "use these payment rails to do business with us, not those ones," it is not unreasonable to suspect that they are doing so not for their own business interests but as a proxy for powers that the government is denied. Someone should be taking a long look at whether the US-based payment processors are becoming a tool of censorship and, if so, how that censorship is being coordinated. It's not like Visa and Mastercard come up with these things independently and on a whim.
Thank baby jebus that this sort of thing never happens. Can you imagine if our government were to, for instance, threaten to deport our own citizens, publicly, for disagreeing with the government. That would be a fucking shit show! Thank you, first amendment!
The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.
[0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low.
They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.
Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own.
I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.
We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
Porn might involve large media files which gives it an up-front advantage re: "more", but it doesn't create shockwaves the way censorship does. Remove a porn video and the world stays largely unchanged. Undo an act of censorship and, well, maybe the world stays unchanged, or maybe everything is different.
Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back. Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.
This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.
I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
[citation needed]
I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).
There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.
Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.
It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man.
Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional
There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.
> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.
This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.
So is the NoFap/incel movement.
There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.
People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage.
You're missing the root causes here.
There is some truth to that, but if one were to operate at that level then Facebook would be illegal.
Porn is a convenient thing to weaponize anger in your constituents (just like babies not being born). It pushes emotional triggers and riles people up and then they're waiting to be told what to hate/attack next.
Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea and if anything they have some of the worst gender toxicity.
The debate is weather or not credit card providers should ever be able to blackmail independent companies, for any reason they feel like.
I say no.
> Banning porn is not going to do a whole lot. Pornography is illegal in South Korea
Making something legal or illegal is just signaling. The real part is how it actually is implemented in practice. And as you imply, things are pretty complex. We really need to be careful about our own tendencies to want things to be simple. It always backfires...
* It models unrealistic and possibly unhealthy notions about sexuality
* It can be exploitive of its subjects (yes, sometimes empowering too)
I believe that "free speech" is critical to a well functioning society, but we need to recognize that it can have negative impacts. A key example is the right-wing Hate Industrial Complex: decades of right wing propaganda have conditioned tens of millions of Americans to consider their fellow citizens as non human.
I don't have an answer for how to address this, but you can't fix a problem until you recognize the problem and that it needs fixing.
Sounds great, where do I sign?
Sure ban porn, but IMO ban social media first. Or at the very least, mandate educational materials on it. Kids grow up thinking it's important and it ruins their lives. Brainrot content deadens their sensory inputs. Same thing needs to happen with AI; we seriously need some required education in these spaces.
If the things being criticised appear in many areas, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that they chose their target because it involves sex, and that is what they have a problem with.
If we are to talk about exploitation, then capitalism itself is subject to be attacked and prohibited.
If we work for a living, we sell our bodies to someone else for a time (40h a week or more). Does it really matter if we work on a factory floor doing parts, sitting and coding at a desk, or having sex in front of a camera? Labor is labor.
Sure its the christian 'sex is bad' in various stripes (puritanical to catholic to baptist etc). But in reality, its just different labor.
Now, capitalism in exploitive in that you generate X value, and you get a small percentage of your labor's output. Some owner is who collects the surplus.
So if exploitation is the problem, then its time to start looking at worker cooperatives, unions, banning shows like Shark Tank, and all the capitalist propaganda.
But no, its just 'sex icky'. We won't actually look at the root of exploitation.
This shows a fairly low level of engagement with the sorts of people that are pushing to ban porn. It’s not uncommon for them to be anti-screens, social media, etc. for similar reasons. The movement is often as much an attempt to get kids outsides and reduce the influence of smartphones and the internet on society as it is an attempt to ban porn.
Often both sexual content and hate speech get added to the same clause.
> it's important to note the difference or you will always be arguing against something other than their claim.
The mistake we often make is that we believe that the other side is not optimizing correctly. Instead, it is often that they are optimizing but under differing constraints. If we don't pay attention to these differing constraints we'll just end up with infuriating arguments as it will ,,sound like'' we're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't. It's one of the major difficulties of communication: we have to make a lot of assumptions to interpret the other person.
Importantly, there's no way to convince the other person that they're wrong unless you are able to understand their model. It's easy to assume you do, but if your model boils down to "they're dumb" or "they're evil" then all you can do is fight. You have to understand your enemy and all that...[0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17976-if-you-know-the-enemy...
Most often this doesn't happen because one side fails to understand the other, it happens because one side is dishonest about their motivations or goals.
In this case, the censors would like you to believe that they think pornography is harmful. The reality is that they're religious zealots who feel the need to prevent other people from making their own choices about something their religious leaders have told them is evil. They can't admit their real goal though, or people will realize it's just westernized Sharia law and stop taking them seriously.
It may not be good logic, or even self-consistent, but everyone is always using some logic. I'm saying "find it if you want to convince them." Very few people see themselves as evil, or more accurately intentionally choosing evil. And I say this as someone who was once a member of a religion that has its own state. You're not going to pull people out of that by acting like they're evil. They're trying very hard to be good, just misguided.
There's an saying that I believe was popularized during the Cold War. I think you should consider it.
The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.That said, I don't agree with censorship and especially by payment processors of all groups. The slippery slope is very concerning for adults who would enjoy any other category of content that are targeted by activist groups. Collective Shout has a history attacking media falling outside the porn bubble.
In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.
Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.
To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.
Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.
They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.
The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.
I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.
There is actually a bipartisan bill proposing precisely that: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/987
I like that idea. The USA actually used to trust bust :|